If you’ve been following me on social media or reading my Substack for any length of time you already know what CARs stands for. For those who do not know, CARs stands for Controlled Articular Rotations. It’s a simple acronym that’s really just a descriptor.
Rotation is what your joint’s fundamental property is and how we want to move.
Articular is referencing the joint space or where the bones meet, along with the space, tissues and fluid within.
Controlled is in reference to how we should do the activity, and is arguably the most important part of the acronym. We want the movement to be done with control and within a space that you can control.
There’s often a misunderstanding when it comes to CARs. Many people see it as a non weight bearing exercise alone that doesn’t do much, but the truth is that it depends on many factors.
CARs are often done as a part of the Daily CARs Routine, which is meant to just be a light input and exploration of your joints. It’s meant to be like a movement preparation for your day, bringing awareness to your joint tissues.
But CARs can also be done with other intentions.
Awareness is the first step in building strength. Once we are aware of something we can begin to train it. The intentions just like any other strength training matters.
Your intention might be Endurance, Strength or Power.
You may want to improve those qualities and in order to do this we must provide the feedback necessary to stimulate your nervous system to create those outcomes.
For this reason, we can can apply various training inputs that help us produce these outcomes.
With CARs everyone’s first thought is to add weight (an external load).
But when we start internally with the basic level of CAR, we still have a few ways we can provide stimulus before adding an external load like a weight of some sort.
In this video, I show you how you can consider moving from Internal Loading towards External Loading. Once you understand this, it can be applied to all of your CARs and your training.
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